I'm always working on ways to help more students with pronunciation. Sometimes it's hard even finding the right thing to teach about. Unless you're teaching English in China or Korea where everyone is from the same language group, it's difficult to find something that applies to all groups equally. Let's look at some examples:

the difference between /p/ and /b/ will give trouble to Arabic speakers, but not Korean or Spanish speakers.

Korean and Japanese speakers with have trouble with "th" sounds, but Arabic speakers generally will not.

some vowels will be easier for one group, but not another

So what do you teach? One thing I've noticed is that sentence stress and rhythm is generally a problem for all learners. So what do we do?

In my experience, it's great to make students aware that English is a stress-timed language, not syllable-timed.

Basically, in English, a sentence becomes longer when there are more stressed words in it. For example, these all take approximately the same time to say: cowseatgreengrassquicklythe cowseat the greengrassquicklythe cows have eaten the grassquicklythe cows have been eating the grassquicklythe cowscouldhave been eating the grassquickly

You see, it's the important words like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that receive stress. The other parts of the sentence, the articles (the), the auxiliary verbs (been, have), modals (could), and verb endings (-ing, -en) are important for grammar but not for the basic meaning of the sentence.

When I show my students this, sometimes they don't believe me, but then I tell them to go out and listen to native speakers talk. They always come back saying, "you're right! That is how they say it!"

If you're learning English, try to pay attention to what people say and how they say it. Listen to what words they stress and what words they don't.

I'd like to also talk about strong vowels and weak vowels in English, which is very closely related to English being stress-timed, but I think that's enough for now.

If you have any questions, please post a comment on this blog post.Have a good one, and good luck out there!